The Big Melt
Documentaries
•
Documentary, UR
A special commission as part of the 100 years of Stainless Steel celebrations, The Big Melt is a feature-length elegy to the men and women who toiled in Sheffield's steelworks and a hymn to Britain's proud industrial past. Working together, Sheffield's own musical hero Jarvis Cocker and acclaimed director Martin Wallace have produced an exquisite tapestry of steel industry-related archival footage drawn from the BFI National Archive.
Jarvis Cocker provides the film's stirring musical accompaniment, collaborating with a raft of Sheffield's finest musicians, including a string quartet, a brass band, members of PULP, Richard Hawley, The Forgemasters and a youth choir.
Up Next in Documentaries
-
Welcome to Britain
About half a mile from Heathrow Airport is Harmondsworth detention centre where the visitors in Ben Lewin’s 1976 film are unceremoniously dumped while government officials ponder British immigration laws. The visitors mostly come from India, Pakistan, and Cyprus and are treated like criminals.
-
Night Mail
The flagship of the GPO Film Unit's output and a cornerstone of British documentary. Harry Watt and Basil Wright's study of the down postal express stands as a beacon for John Grierson's original purpose for documentary - to make the working man the hero of the screen. A truly collaborative effor...
-
Spare Time
Humphrey Jennings epitomises the artist-filmmaker and this poetic evocation of ordinary people enjoying well-earned time away from the mill, mine, or foundry is a forerunner to Jennings’ later wartime greats such as Listen to Britain. Joyous shots of people either pigeon fancying, ballroom dan...
